Office 365

It’s quite common for administrators to get caught out by IP changes in the Office 365 pool, and to find a service becoming intermittently inaccessible due to the addition of an IP address range to the pool of IPs used by an Office 365 service.

Microsoft publish an RSS feed to make this a bit easier for admins to follow, however I wanted to take this one step further.

Using Microsoft Flow (or IFTTT if that’s your bag), you can configure an event so that an update to an RSS feed prompts an action. That action could be to send an email, to update SharePoint or Yammer, or to update a Spreadsheet (amongst others). People consume information in many different ways, and this is one way to customise the delivery of this information to suit the way you work.

As an example, I want to send an email to myself every time a change is made to the Office 365 IP address RSS feed. To do this, I have logged into Microsoft Flow and have created a new Flow for myself.

I put together a short script recently which will enumerate all users in an Office 365 Group (Security/Distribution/O365Group) and disable certain Client Access features. In my case, I wanted to disabled IMAP, POP and MAPI connectivity. This leaves a user only able to perform Kiosk style connectivity through either OWA, EWS or ActiveSync. The users in question had E1 licenses, but the customer wanted to limit connectivity so that rich mail clients such as Outlook could not be used.

The last two times I have run through this process, I have attempted to test the PF Migration on a single user prior to going live for all users. Microsoft suggest the following command for doing this:

However since the Exchange 2016 wave of Office 365 has gone live, this command no longer appears to have the desired effect. What seems to happen is that because the -IsExcludedFromServingHierarchy parameter is set to $true, the command does not fully enable the Public Folders for that user.

In both situations, I have taken the plunge and enabled Office 365 Public Folders for all users by running:

The end result (after a little patience) is that Public Folders become available for all users. I’m not sure if this is a general bug or a result of the Exchange 2016 backend of Office 365, but I’d be interested to hear your experiences!

The above title isn’t a surprise for anybody working in IT, but unusually for Public Folders, this one has a fairly simple fix!

The situation is thus; when attempting to complete a Public Folder migration to Office 365, you come across the following error:

Before finalizing the migration, it is necessary to lock down public folders on the legacy Exchange server (downtime required). Make sure public folder access is locked on the legacy Exchange server and then try to complete the batch again.

The problem with this error is that you have already locked down Public Folders on the legacy Exchange Server by running:

Set-OrganizationConfig -PublicFoldersLockedForMigration:$true

So what’s an admin to do when they’ve already run the command they are being told needs to be run?! Some googling may lead you to the idea of rebooting the server, or restarting the Information Store. Both of these will work, but a much simpler solution is simply to dismount the Public Folder database/s, and then mount them. The PFs are already locked so are unavailable to the users so there is no negative impact of doing this.

There are many reasons why you might want to run PowerShell scripts against Office 365/Exchange Online on a schedule, so I won’t fuss with any examples. Here is how it is done.

First you must create an encoded script file which contains the password for the Exchange Online/Office 365 admin which you want to use to login. It is important that you create the .key file

a) on the computer which will be running the scheduled task
b) using the account which will run the Scheduled Task

This is because as only the creator can decrypt the .key file, and this can only be done on the computer which generated the key file. To create your encrypted password file, open Powershell and run the following command:

This will ask you to enter the password and then give you a file full of rubbish. Now let’s do something with that rubbish! Your script to connect to Exchange Online and Office 365 should look like the following:

After these lines, add in the Powershell commands you wish to run, or a reference to a script. Save this as a .ps1 file.

For example, Clutter can’t be disabled for the whole tenancy, so to get around this I might want to disable clutter for all my users every night by adding this line to the end of my script:

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Set-Clutter -Enable $false

Once you are all done with your script, open Task Scheduler and create a new task.

On the general tab, ensure that the user account being used to run the task is the same account which created the password file, and make sure the ‘Run whether user is logged on or not’ is ticked. Add whichever time based triggers you need, and on the Actions page choose to ‘Start a Program’ with the following settings:

Here’s a small Friday afternoon snippet of useful information for all you Office 365/Identity nerds out there.

If you have converted an AAD user from ‘Synced with Active Directory’ to ‘In Cloud’ and you want to sync a new user object with that user, you will need to clear the ImmutableID and then match it up with the new user object. I’m planning on creating a more extensive post on that very subject in the near future, but for now, I’ll give you this titbit of information:

You might think that those quote marks are a bit pointless, but you would be wrong! If you were to run the command as shown below, without the “” marks, it wouldn’t show you an error, but it also wouldn’t actually clear the ImmutableID.

Azure App Cloud Discovery is a seriously cool piece of technology. Being able to scan your entire computer estate for cloud SaaS applications in either a targeted, or catch-all manner can really help discover the ‘Shadow IT’ going on in your environment. Nowadays, users not having local admin rights won’t necessarily stop them from using cloud SaaS apps in any way which is going to increase their productivity. Users don’t generally think about the impact of using such applications, and the potential for data leakage.

But, as with lots of Microsoft’s other cloud technologies which are being launched left, right and centre at the moment, the Enterprise isn’t catered for as it might hope. Most Enterprise IT departments leverage some kind of web filtering, or proxying. This may be using transparent proxying, in which case you can count your blessings as Cloud App Discovery will work just fine. If you are explicitly defining a proxy in your internet settings, then you can get around that by adding particular registry keys. However if you are using a PAC file to control access to the internet, then unfortunately Cloud App Discovery will not work for you. This is a shame as it is, in my opinion, the best way to approach web proxying in an Enterprise, but that’s another story. From what I have heard, a feature is in the works which will allow you to configure Cloud App Discovery agents to log their findings to an internal data collector. This data collector can sit on a local server and then upload data to Azure on your behalf, which is a much more elegant solution to the problem of data collection from multiple machines. However as far as I know, this feature is not available yet. I’ll be keeping my ear to the ground and will let you know if this changes.

In the meantime, if you are desperate to get your data collection up and running in the meantime, you could change to explicitly defined proxying, and configure registry settings for your clients as per the following MS article:

Cloud App Discovery is a feature of Azure Active Directory Premium, a toolkit designed to take your Azure Active Directory to new, cloudier heights. Azure AD Premium can be bought standalone, or comes bundled with the Enterprise Mobility Suite. I would highly recommend it to Office 365 customers as it can give you and your users some great new features which can help make your Azure AD the best it can be!